Electronic journals, scholarly communication and libraries

The recent surge in scientific electronic journals began when libraries began having access to the WWW in the mid-1990s. The shift from paper to digital has affected the traditional alignment and role of the primary "stakeholders" -mainly authors, publishers, universities and libraries. The author offers a brief review of the history of the scholarly journal followed by the evolution of e-journals in during the past two decades. The article then focuses on the implications that these have had on traditional library processes and services such as selection, acquisitions, cataloguing, storage, preservation and user services. In the conclusion the author speculates on the long term effect of Web-based publishing on the format of the traditional scholarly journal as it has existed for over 300 years.

Iowa Supreme Court Improvement Project for Child in Need of Assistance Cases: Annual Report and Proposed Policy Revisions.

The first part of a three year plan to evaluate and recommend improvements to Iowa's Juvenile Courts.

Statewide Economic Impacts of Disaster-Related Payments to Support Household and Private and Public Sector Recovery in Iowa, January 2010

There have been a multitude of programs providing assistance to the state of Iowa in the past 18 months. Springtime 2008 disasters resulted in tornado damage and widespread flood damage to large fractions of the state. In consequence, there was a very large flow of federal and state resources dedicated to assisting community and statewide recovery efforts. The nation was in recession as well and continued to be in recession through much of 2009. A sizeable amount of assistance found its way to Iowa under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in the forms of infrastructure stimulus spending, income supports and other safety net spending for households, and stabilization assistance for essential public services like education. On top of that, the state of Iowa authorized the I Jobs program as an additional infrastructure development program, and as a jobs stimulus program. The total amount of spending for all types of programs, disaster or economic recovery related, is perhaps as high as $7.5 billion over the next few years.

How siblings adjust sib-sib communication and begging signals to each other

Parents allocate food resources to their offspring in proportion to the intensity of begging behaviour. Begging encompasses several activities including vocalizations that should honestly signal need and jostling for the position in the nest where parents predictably deliver food items. Although siblings are known to adjust begging level to each other, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We examined this issue in experimental two-chick broods of the barn owl, Tyto alba, a species in which siblings communicate vocally with each other in the prolonged absence of parents. The function of sib-sib vocal communication, so-called sibling negotiation, is to resolve conflicts over which individual will have priority of access to the next delivered indivisible food item. We found that when a nestling produced longer negotiation calls and stood closer to the nestbox entrance in the absence of parents, its sibling vocally negotiated at a lower rate. Additionally, when an individual produced more negotiation calls in the absence of parents, its sibling begged less intensely at the parent's return, with begging being the key factor that determined which nestling obtained a food item. We conclude that position in the nest and the duration of negotiation calls produced in the absence of parents influence the rate of producing negotiation calls, which in turn influences the rate at which siblings beg for food from their parents. Adjusting begging behaviour could therefore depend on complex sib-sib interactions taking place in the prolonged absence of parents.